Tue
10/1 |
- E. W. Dijkstra, The Structure of the 'THE'-Multiprogramming System,
Communications of the ACM, May 1968.
(Additional historical background on semaphores
in Wikipedia.)
Q: Dijkstra explicitly states their goals for the
THE operating system. How do these goals compare to, say, Microsoft's
goals for the Windows operating system? Why do we no longer build
operating systems with the same goals as THE?
- P. B. Hansen, The
Nucleus of a Multiprogramming System, Communications of the ACM, April 1970.
Q: How does synchronization in the RC 4000 system
compare with synchronization in the THE system?
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Thu
10/3 |
- D. G. Bobrow, J. D. Burchfiel, D. L. Murphy, and R. S. Tomlinson,
TENEX, a Paged Time Sharing System for the PDP-10, Communications of the ACM, March 1972.
Q: What features in TENEX are reminiscent of
features in Unix?
- D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson, The UNIX Time-Sharing System,
Communications of the ACM, July 1974.
Q: What aspects of Unix as described in the 1974
paper do not survive today, or have been considerably changed?
Optional paper that questions whether fork() is good abstraction for modern programmers:
Andrew Baumann, Jonathan Appavoo, Orran Krieger, and Timothy Roscoe, A fork() in the Road, In Proceedings of the Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS'19), May 2019.
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Tue
10/8 |
- W. Wulf, E. Cohen, W. Corwin, A. Jones, R. Levin, C. Pierson, and
F. Pollack, HYDRA: The Kernel of a Multiprocessor Operating System,
Communications of the ACM, June 1974.
Q: How is a Hydra procedure different from the
procedures we are familiar with in a typical language and runtime
environment?
- B. Lampson,
Protection, Operating
Systems Review, January 1974.
Q: What are the concepts in Hydra that correspond to
Lampson's definitions of "Domain", "Object", and "Access Matrix"?
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Thu
10/10 |
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Tue
10/22 |
- D. R. Cheriton and W. Zwaenepoel, The
Distributed V Kernel and its Performance for Diskless
Workstations, In Proceedings of the 9th Symposium on Operating
Systems Principles (SOSP'83), November 1983.
Q: What is the argument for diskless
workstations, and do you agree/disagree with the
argument?
- J. K. Ousterhout, A. R. Cerenson, F. Douglis,
M. N. Nelson, and B. B. Welch, The Sprite Network Operating
System, IEEE Computer, February 1988.
Q: How do the caching policies in Sprite
differ from those in the V Kernel?
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Thu
10/24 |
- R. Pike, D. Presotto, S. Dorward, B. Flandrena, K. Thompson, H. Trickey, and P. Winterbottom,
Plan 9 From Bell Labs,
USENIX Computing Systems, July 1995.
Q: What does it mean, "9P is really the core of the
system; it is fair to say that the Plan 9 kernel is primarily a 9P
multiplexer"?
- Y. Shan, Y. Huang, Y. Chen, Y. Zhang,
LegoOS: A Disseminated, Distributed OS for Hardware Resource Disaggregation,
In Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'18), October 2018.
Q: Which resources in LegoOS are partially diaggregated vs. fully disaggregated? Why?
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Thu
10/31 |
- R. J. Creasy, The Origin of the VM/370 Time-Sharing System, In IBM Journal of
Research and Development, September 1981.
Q: What was VM/370's motivation for virtualizing the hardware?
- P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt, and A. Warfield, Xen and the Art of Virtualization, In Proceedings of the 19th Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP'03), October, 2003.
Q: Microkernels and virtual machine monitors are two different ways to
support the execution of multiple operating systems on modern
hardware. How does the microkernel approach in L4 compare and
constrast with the VMM approach in Xen?
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Tue
11/5 |
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Thu
11/7 |
- M. K. McKusick, W. N. Joy, S. J. Leffler, and
R. S. Fabry, A Fast File System for Unix, ACM Transactions on
Computer Systems, August 1984.
Q: In FFS, reading is always at least as fast as writing.
In old UFS, writing was 50% faster. Why is this?
- M. Rosenblum and J. K. Ousterhout, The
Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System,
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'91),
December 1991.
Q: When we want to read a block in LFS on disk, how do we figure out where it is?
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Tue
11/12 |
- G. R. Ganger, M. McKusick, C. Soules, and
Y. Patt. Soft
Updates: A Solution to the Metadata Update Problem in File
Systems, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, May 2000.
Q: What is the metadata update problem?
Optional recent paper about a variant of Soft Updates that uses the Rust compiler:
H. LeBlanc, N. Taylor, J. Bornholt, and V. Chidambaram, SquirrelFS: Using the Rust Compiler to Check File-System Crash Consistency, In Proceedings of the Eighteenth
USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI'24), July 2024.
- R. Kadekodi, S. Lee, S. Kashyap, T. Kim,
A. Kolli, V. Chidambaram,
SplitFS:
Reducing Software Overhead in File Systems for Persistent Memory,
In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'19), October 2019.
Q: Why does it make sense to design file systems for persistent memory differently?
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Thu
11/14 |
- T. E. Anderson, B. N. Bershad, E. D. Lazowska, H. M. Levy, Scheduler Activations: Effective Kernel Support for the User-level Management of Parallelism, In Proceedings of the 13th ACM
Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'91), Sept. 1991.
Q: The goal of scheduler activations is to have the benefits of both user and kernel threads without their limitations. What are the limitations of user and kernel threads, and what are the benefits that scheduler activations provide?
Optional recent paper that tackles the same problem:
H. Qin, Q. Li, J. Speiser, P. Kraft and J. Ousterhout, Arachne:
Core-Aware Thread Management, In Proceedings of the Thirteenth
USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI'18),
October 2018.
- J. Lozi, B. Lepers, J. Funston, F. Gaud, V. Quéma, and A. Fedorova, The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores. In Proceedings of the Eleventh European Conference on Computer Systems (Eurosys'16), 2016.
Q: What makes multicore scheduling more challenging than single-core scheduling?
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Tue
11/19 |
- P. E. McKenney, J. Fernandes, and S. Boyd-Wickizer,
RCU Usage In the Linux Kernel: Eighteen Years Later.
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, August 2020.
Q: In what settings is RCU a particularly good choice, or a particularly bad choice?
- S. Boyd-Wickizer, A. T. Clements, Y. Mao, A. Pesterev,
M. F. Kaashoek, R. Morris, and N. Zeldovich,
An Analysis of Linux Scalability to Many Cores,
In Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'10), October 2010.
Q: What kinds of application behavior can cause an application to scale poorly?
Optional paper that proposes a rule for determining if an interface is scalable:
Austin T. Clements, M. Frans Kaashoek, Nickolai Zeldovich, Robert Morris, Eddie Kohler,
The Scalable Commutativity Rule: Designing Scalable Software for Multicore Processors,
In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
(SOSP'13), October 2013.
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Thu
11/21 |
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Tue
11/26 |
-
A. Belay, G. Prekas, A. Klimovic, S. Grossman, C. Kozyrakis, and E. Bugnion
IX: A Protected Dataplane Operating System for
High Throughput and Low Latency,
In Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI'14), October 2014.
Q: What is the difference between the control plane and the data plane and why does IX separate them?
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M. Marty, M. de Kruijf, J. Adriaens, C. Alfeld,
S. Bauer, C. Contavalli, M. Dalton, N. Dukkipati,
W. C. Evans, S. Gribble, N. Kidd, R. Kononov, G.
Kumar, C. Mauer, E. Musick, L. Olson, E. Rubow, M. Ryan,
K. Springborn, P. Turner, V. Valancius, X. Wang and A. Vahdat,
Snap: a Microkernel Approach to Host Networking,
In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'19), October 2019.
Q: What are the tradeoffs between the monolithic, libOS, and microkernel-based approaches to structuring a network stack?
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